


Reconcile

by BearingNoIllWill



Category: Friends at the Table (Podcast)
Genre: Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Post-Series, i play fast and loose with canon to dramatic effect, people suffer for it
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-31
Updated: 2016-10-31
Packaged: 2018-08-28 03:25:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,199
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8430007
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BearingNoIllWill/pseuds/BearingNoIllWill
Summary: Things come together in scraps and fragments after the events of High Sun Day. Vignettes from Edmund's point of view up until he reaches the mansion, Ethan's after his arrival.





	

**Author's Note:**

> As I said, fast and loose with canon and more plot-oriented than my usual fare.

Urgency

 

1.

 Edmund’s hands shake as he pulls things from drawers and throws them into the bag on his bed. The map. A blanket. Ethan’s cavalry pistol. A bit of food grabbed hastily from the kitchen. He cannot even look at the rest of his brother’s things across the room as he packs—his mind rushes, delirious with fever and awash with an inextricable tangle of images that overlays his reality like a thick haze. It won’t be enough. He won’t know it for days, but it won’t be enough.

 

2.

The heat is oppressive as he rides out of Marielda. There is sweat beading on his brow and running down his back, drenching his bandages, plastering soaked, bloodstained fabric to burning skin. Still, Edmund presses on, borne forward by a desperate urgency that his body cannot sustain. Behind him, all hell has broken loose. Before him, with the Black Slacks and Samot’s armies past, the road is blessedly, terrifyingly empty.

 

3.

By nightfall Edmund is slumped in the saddle, unseeing eyes staring vacantly into the distance, following the tangle of memories that flicker across the trees. His cracked lips move soundlessly in response to equally unheard questions.

 “I’m sorry,” he murmurs, “I’m sorry.”

 He swears he can see Ethan in front of him, cold and angry in one moment and encouraging him forward the next. He barely registers when he slides down from his horse, barely manages to make camp for the night, barely remembers to eat before drifting into unconsciousness.

 

4.

He dreams. Behind Edmund’s eyelids, Marielda burns. Images of the end that came and the end that could have been cut together, The Heat and the Dark lapping at the edge of the city, void unfurling, blossoming into the blood on Samothes’s robe—things he didn’t see, impressions built from inferences after the fact. Edmund wakes sobbing and sick. He drags himself away on his hands and knees and heaves into the underbrush, retching again and again until his stomach is empty and the gash on his neck burns like a brand. Tears slip down his cheeks. There is no more sleep that night.

 

5. 

The next four days pass much like the first. He rides until he collapses. The nights are colder, he begins to realize, the farther he gets from Marielda. Even as his fever begins to lift and his thoughts begin to clear, he shivers in his sleep. The dreams change, but they do not go away. More and more, they are the thoughts he will not let himself consider in the waking hours. Dreams where he can see the mansion, where he doesn’t make it, where Ethan turns him away. His clothes are filthy and the blanket is thin. By the end of the week, his food has run out. None of it was enough.

 

6.

Edmund glimpses the mansion through the trees as he walks, still wounded, starving, half-dead on his feet. The horse is dead, put down when it could ride no further by the twin to that pistol which he leveled at Maelgwyn. It is only single-minded determination that has carried him this far like some preternatural force, but here it gives way, and he freezes. Momentarily, he is too exhausted for disbelief, too exhausted for dread, nearly too exhausted for relief. At the end of a half-mile that feels far longer, Edmund mounts the steps to a clean white door, knocks, and waits.

 

 Patience

 

 1.

Ethan opens the door and he’s there on the doorstep. Edmund is gaunt, and hollow eyed, and covered in dried blood (gods alive, there’s so much blood) but he’s there, and he’s alive. For a second, Ethan hold’s his gaze and tries to read his haunted expression, but Edmund breaks eye contact, looking beyond him. It’s been days of large empty rooms and the feeling of dancing between unexpected familiarity and gnawing, empty anger, and now—and now. Ethan still isn’t sure whether he wants to pull his brother in for a hug or punch him. Instead, he steadies Edmund when he wavers on his feet, rambles a welcome, and leads him inside.

 

2.

Samol plays. Ethan doesn’t have to lead Edmund to the yard—the sound draws him in of his own accord, like a dying man to water. Ethan stands behind and watches something lift in Edmund’s eyes, something, he realizes, that has been there since long before High Sun Day. He looks drained and relieved. Ethan begins to wonder how much he doesn’t know.           

 

3.

He makes sure his brother is bathed and fed. Edmund drops into the chair across from him, looking slightly more than a shadow of himself now, and Ethan pushes a plate towards him. The silence that hangs as Edmund eats carries none of the raw animosity of that day in the forge—not here, not in this place—but the air is heavy with expectation.

 Edmund puts down his fork. “I couldn’t have told you.”

 “Couldn’t you?” It comes out colder than Ethan intends.

 Not for the first time that day, the look he sees on his own features shakes him.

 

4.

This time it is Ethan’s hands that tremble. He prizes the filthy bandages away from Edmund’s neck, flinching when Edmund grimaces in pain. The gash there is raw and half knitted, and there is still an unnatural heat just under the surface when he touches Edmund’s skin. Ethan can recognize a fatal wound.

 “If it wasn’t for Aubrey…” Edmund trails off.

 Ethan doesn’t ask any more questions, not tonight.

           

5.

The first night, Ethan does not sleep. He paces until he cannot bear it, stopping in the doorway of the room Edmund took, and then moving to sit at his bedside. His brother thrashes in his sleep, mired in dreams that Ethan is still only guessing at, really. A long night passes. At some unholy hour, Edmund starts awake with a cry. He is as sick as he was that first night in the woods, but this time, Ethan is beside him with a basin and a cool cloth.

 

6.

There are long silences that Ethan cannot fill, and Edmund won’t, not at first. From time to time he catches Edmund staring into the distance, fingering the scar at this throat. He learns, when it happens, to draw him into a dance, or a duel, something familiar to occupy his mind. It works, and in pieces, Edmund seems to come back to himself in full. The first time he fumbles and Edmund laughs, it’s like being whole again.

            

Epilogue

 

There is a quiet day. And then a night. And then a week. There is something about this house that softens edges, that offers familiarity where there should be none. Edmund’s pain eases and Ethan’s lingering anger cools. It is as if the distance between them no longer snaps tight, like it has been stretched so far beyond capacity that it will never be the same. They learn to navigate it. Over a breakfast, Ethan learns about Memoriam, about what happened before that long, lonely summer. He begins to piece together the events of High Sun Day. Outside, it gets colder. They move on.


End file.
